Entries in FIdel Castro
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Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Alex Wong/Getty Images(MIAMI, Fla.) -- Mitt Romney accused President Obama of a policy of “appeasement” toward Cuba and said that he looked forward to the day Fidel Castro dies.

“This is a critical time. I think you realize that. We’ve waited a long, long time for the opportunity that is represented by a new president, and by new leadership, or by old leadership finally kicking the bucket in Cuba,” said Romney, referring to Fidel Castro, during a speech given to a US-Cuba Democracy PAC event in downtown Miami. “I want to be the American president that is proud to be able to say that I was president at the time that we brought freedom back to the people of Cuba.”

“If I’m fortunate to become the next president of the United States it is my expectation that Fidel Castro will finally be taken off this planet,” said Romney. “I doubt he’ll take any time in the sky he’ll find a nether region to be more to his comfort.”

Romney criticized Obama for giving too many “gifts” to Castro during his presidency, remarking that negotiation only works when you get something in return.

“I know I learned something about negotiating,” said Romney. “I found that if I was trying to negotiate with someone else that before I gave them something, I wanted to know what I was going to get back. The idea that I’m going to negotiate, it’s a trade -- I’m going to get something, and they’re going to get something.”

“This president has decided to give a gift, to Castro, to allow remittances to come from the United States to go into Cuba and help the economy of Cuba. He’s allowed more traveling into Cuba. Showing that olive branch if you will,” said Romney. “And how has it been met? It is met with a man, Wilman Villar, who must sacrifice his own life through his hunger strike, with many, many people being oppressed in prison.”

Villar died last week after a 50-day hunger strike.

“This president does not understand that by helping Castro, he is not helping the people of Cuba, he is hurting them, he is not putting forward a policy of freedom, he is accommodating and encouraging a policy of oppression, and if I’m President of the United States, we will return to Helms-Burton and the law, and we will not give Castro any gifts,” said Romney.

US Senate(WASHINGTON) -- Senator Marco Rubio, R-Fla., seen as a possible VP candidate, has found himself in a controversy over the details of his family history, denying that he embellished the story of his family fleeing from Cuba after Castro took power for political gain.

An investigation by The Washington Post through the Rubio family’s naturalization papers, official records and passports reveal that Rubio’s parents came to the U.S. more than 2.5 years before Castro’s forces overthrew the Cuban government.

“The real story of his parents’ migration appears to be a more conventional immigrant narrative, a couple who came to the United States seeking a better life,” Manuel Roig-Franzia writes in the Washington Post. ”In the year they arrived in Florida, the future Marxist dictator was in Mexico plotting a quixotic return to Cuba.”

This is contrary to what Rubio has claimed in countless speech on the campaign trail for Senate and now in the Senate.

In a statement, the junior senator from Florida defended himself and his family history, saying that the idea that he embellished his story for political gain is “outrageous.”

“The dates I have given regarding my family’s history have always been based on my parents’ recollections of events that occurred over 55 years ago and which were relayed to me by them more than two decades after they happened,” Rubio said in a statement. "I was not made aware of the exact dates until very recently. What’s important is that the essential facts of my family’s story are completely accurate.”

Rubio then attempted to explain the details that he did not know before.

After arriving in the United States, the senator says, his parents “had always hoped to one day return to Cuba” if things improved and traveled there several times.

In 1961, his mother and older siblings returned to Cuba while his father stayed behind “wrapping up the family’s matters” in the U.S.

After just a few weeks living there, his mother, “fully realized the true nature of the direction Castro was taking Cuba and returned to the United States one month later, never to return.”

“They were exiled from the home country they tried to return to because they did not want to live under communism,” Rubio said. “That is an undisputed fact and to suggest otherwise is outrageous. Politicians, whether mistakenly or purposely, getting the facts wrong in their family history is nothing new.”